Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is author of: Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation; Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists and African Liberation in the 21st Century; and Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics. Follow on Twitter @Horace_Campbell.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

The war against Iraq and the peoples of Africa: Ten years and war implications still pertinent

On Tuesday 19, March 2013, there were commentaries all over the Western
media about the impact of the war against the People of Iraq on the
world. US commentators focused on the meaning of the war for their
society while the mainstream media worked hard to divert attention from
the impact of the war on current questions such as the global economic
crisis and the continued militarization of the planet. Within the peace
and social justice movement the occasion has been used as a means of
mobilizing citizens about the tremendous cost of more than $2.2 trillion
to the society. After accounting for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
killed or maimed, these peace groups have been seeking to learn lessons
of the cost of the war.

There has been no clear accounting of the cost of the war against the
people of Iraq for Africa. From the moment of the buildup to the war,
Africans were integrated and implicated into this global imperial attack
on Iraq. It was also from Africa where there has been the clearest
opposition, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa calling for
George Bush and Tony Blair to be tried as war criminals. The discussions
of the impact of the war in Iraq is pertinent in Africa for another
reason, many of the private military contractors that enjoyed lucrative
contracts in Iraq are stoking the fires of instability in Africa to
provide the employment opportunities for US private military
contractors. The non-governmental organizations from the USA who now
work in tandem with the US Africa Command have remained silent in the
face of the reorganized military thrust in Africa under the banner of
defense, development and diplomacy. It is from the network of those same
forces that have been discredited in Iraq where the US counter-terror
experts are planning for the expansion of US military activities in
Africa. This week provides another opportunity to spell out the cost of
this war on Africa and why increased mobilization must take place by the
international peace forces to oppose the militarization of Africa under
the guise of fighting a Global War on Terror.

COST OF THE WAR PROJECT

March 19, the tenth anniversary of the war against the peoples of Iraq
provided another opportunity for a thorough examination of the negative
impact of this war on the entire human community. Most of the
commentaries inside the United States have served to distort the full
impact of this war on the world economy. Very few citizens of the United
States remember the original justification for this war, that the
leader of Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to
the terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.
These two justifications for the war were fabrications and ten years
after the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the peoples of Iraq are now
less free than they were under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. As
if to underline the levels of insecurity ten years after this freedom
operation on March 19, 2013 there was a wave of bombings in Baghdad
which killed more than 50 people.

A comprehensive analysis of the War has been compiled by the Cost of the
War Project of Brown University. According to the first comprehensive
analysis of direct and indirect human and economic costs of the war,
this report outlined that the war has killed at least 190,000 people,
including men and women in uniform, contractors and civilians and will
cost the United States $2.2 trillion — a figure that far exceeds the
initial 2002 estimates by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget of
$50 to $60 billion. www.costsofwar.org

Among the findings of this Report:

• More than 70 percent of those who died of direct war violence in Iraq
have been civilians — an estimated 134,000. This number does not account
for indirect deaths due to increased vulnerability to disease or injury
as a result of war-degraded conditions. That number is estimated to be
several times higher.

• The Iraq War will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers at least $2.2
trillion. Because the Iraq war appropriations were funded by borrowing,
cumulative interest through 2053 could amount to more than $3.9
trillion.

• The $2.2 trillion figure includes care for veterans who were injured
in the war in Iraq, which will cost the United States almost $500
billion through 2053.

• The total of U.S. service members killed in Iraq is 4,488. At least
3,400 U.S. contractors have died as well, a number often under-reported.

• Terrorism in Iraq increased dramatically as a result of the invasion
and tactics and fighters were exported to Syria and other neighboring
countries.

• Iraq’s health care infrastructure remains devastated from sanctions
and war. More than half of Iraq’s medical doctors left the country
during the 2000s, and tens of thousands of Iraqi patients are forced to
seek health care outside the country.

• The $60 billion spent on reconstruction for Iraq has not gone to
rebuilding infrastructure such as roads, health care, and water
treatment systems, but primarily to the military and police. The Special
Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has found massive fraud,
waste, and abuse of reconstruction funds.
These findings are of tremendous importance for Africa because there
have been wars led by the US on Africa, especially in Somalia but there
has been no similar study on the Costs of War in Africa.

IMPLICATIONS FOR AFRICA

The first and most important implication for Africa is the clear
recognition that the justification for war in Iraq was based on clear
fabrication. At every step of the way, these fabrications enmeshed
African societies and diverted resources away from reconstruction and
transformation of Africa. From the fabrication of the facts that Iraq
was planning to import yellow cake from Niger in order to enhance its
capabilities for the production of nuclear weapons to the dossier
compiled by CIA on the links between Saddam and Al Quaeda – all of this
proved to be part of the disinformation and lies of war.

Because the lies about what happened in Iraq cannot be agreed on, there
is dispute on the exact war crimes committed by the United States and
its allies in Iraq. The medical journal Lancet has written extensively
on the adverse health consequences of the Iraq War (2003—11) and stated
that the effects were profound. The authors of the study for Lancet
stated that ‘at least 116 903 Iraqi non-combatants and more than 4800
imperial military personnel died over the 8-year course. Many Iraqi
civilians were injured or became ill because of damage to the
health-supporting infrastructure of the country, and about 5 million
were displaced. More than 31 000 US military personnel were injured and a
substantial percentage of those deployed suffered post-traumatic stress
disorder, traumatic brain injury, and other neuropsychological
disorders and their concomitant psychosocial problems. Many family
members of military personnel had psychological problems. Further review
of the adverse health consequences of this war could help to minimize
the adverse health consequences of, and help to prevent, future wars.’

This neutral language of Lancet could not, however, hide the truth of
the full dimensions of the US-led attack on the peoples of Iraq. Prior
to the war, this society was the most secular in the Middle East and the
society with the most developed professional class. Western military
intervention stoked sectarian religious violence and this sectarianism
was compounded by the counter-insurgency strategies of the US war
machine. Very few of the commentaries from mainstream organs such as the
Brookings Institute or the New York Times dwelt on the clear torture
and debasing actions of the US military such as the siege of Fallujah
where the US military turned a city of 350,000 people into a free-fire
zone. The war and violence in Fallujah remains one of the low points of
human conduct of warfare since the experiences of World War II because
the US military bombed the citizens of Fallujah with white phosphorus
shells. This kind of weaponry had been banned under international law.

In addition to the images of the use of banned materials in Fallujah
were the images that came out of the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib. Up
to the present the question of the systematic use of torture by the US
military has now created an image of US military personnel as torturers.
That Hollywood has been willing to celebrate this aspect of the US
military overseas has only expanded the knowledge of this use of torture
by US military and intelligence services.

PRIVATE MILITARY CONTRACTORS

If torture and use of poisonous substances represented the second major
lesson of the US campaign in Iraq, then the third major lesson was the
use of private military contractors in war. By the time of the surge of
General David Petraeus in 2007, the number of U.S.-paid private
contractors in Iraq exceeded that of American combat troops. In 2007
the Los Angeles Times reported that more than 180,000 civilians --
including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis – were working in Iraq under
U.S. contracts. This figure compared to the 160,000 soldiers and a few
thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq by the
Department of Defense. If the war in Afghanistan had become the
experimental base for this kind of integration between private
contractors and the US military, then Iraq was where the model was
perfected.

Jeremy Scahill in his study of Blackwater and other contractors,
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, drew
attention to the reality that these contractors operated as a law unto
themselves and that there was absolutely no effective system of
oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations.
These contractors were not subjected to military justice and after the
killings at Nisoor Square, the real powers of these contractors was
demonstrated in so far as their contracts remained with the State
Department. In this industry of hundreds of billions of dollars key
African societies were drawn into the war in Iraq in so far as the
private contractors recruited lower level imperial servants from
societies such as Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia. One estimate from the
Christian Science Monitor revealed that in 2009 there were more than 10,
000 Ugandans serving as low level mercenaries in Iraq. This revelation
brought out clearly the alliance between the Museveni government in
Uganda and the military wars in the Middle East.

RENDITION AND TORTURE

The fourth major impact of the invasion of Iraq was the way in which
repressive governments in Africa used the cover of terrorism to repress
local opposition and to curry favour with the US military. It was in
North Africa and in the Sahel region where this practice was most
developed. The use of torture by these governments was only exceeded by
the readiness of these governments to participate in programs of
rendition by the US government. Earlier this year the Open Society
brought out a Study on the GLOBALIZING TORTURE: CIA SECRET DETENTION AND
EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION. http://goo.gl/zT6Dg

This document listed 54 countries that were integrated into this web of
illegal detentions and transportation. Of the 54 countries mentioned in
the study there were 13 countries that were named as participating in
the rendition program. These were in alphabetical order: Algeria,
Djibouti, and Egypt. Ethiopia, Gabon, Kenya, Libya, Malawi, Mauritania,
Morocco, Somalia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Open Society presented
this report as part of its participation in the debate in the United
States on Torture but this same Open Society has not been as forthcoming
to support the exposure of the US military crimes in Africa. In fact,
it is urgent, for Open Society to maintain its credibility, that it uses
its influence to document the activities of entities such as Bancroft
Development that are presently disguised as non-governmental
organization in Somalia.

AFRICAN OPPOSITION TO THE WAR

From the outset of the military campaign, opinion in Africa was
dominated by the opposition to the war. This opposition was most clearly
articulated by the African Union in 2003 before the beginning of the
campaign that was hyped as Shock and Awe. The AU issued a statement to
the effect that , ‘A military confrontation in Iraq would be a
destabilizing factor for the whole region and would have far reaching
economic and security consequences for all the countries of the world
and, particularly, for those of Africa.’

This recognition of the implications for Africa has persisted with
luminaries such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu rightly calling what was done
to the people of Iraq a war crime. In 2012, Tutu called on the
international Criminal Court to arrest both George Bush Jr and former
British Prime Minister Tony Blair on charges of war crimes. The retired
Anglican Church’s archbishop of South Africa wrote in an op-ed piece for
The Observer newspaper that the ex-leaders of Britain and the United
States should be made to ‘answer for their actions,’ claiming the Iraq
war has destabilized and polarized the world ‘to a greater extent than
any other conflict in history.’

‘Those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be
treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have
been made to answer for their actions in The Hague …The then-leaders of
the U.S. and U.K. fabricated the grounds to behave like playground
bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a
precipice where we now stand — with the specter of Syria and Iran
before us … The question is not whether Saddam Hussein was good or bad
or how many of his people he massacred. The point is that Mr. Bush and
Mr. Blair should not have allowed themselves to stoop to his immoral
level.’

TRANSFORMATION AND REGRESSION

Desmond Tutu rightly grasped the reality that the Iraq war represented a
turning point in history. It was the war that finally exposed the
diminution of the military power of the United States and ushered in the
period of economic crisis from which the world has not recovered. Most
people now understand that the war against the people of Iraq was an
imperialist war and that the criminal activities of the United States
cannot be covered up. These revelations are important at a moment when
the same fabrication of terrorism is being propagated in order to
justify the expansion of the US war and military campaign in Africa. In
the face of the impending cuts in the budgets of the United States, the
most conservative sections of the US policy establishment are joining
forces with France to militarize the Sahara.

Twenty years after the war in Somalia, there has been no corresponding
Cost of the War study to expose the monetary and social costs as well as
the costs in lives for the entire region of eastern Africa. People in
the Horn of Africa continue to die from the continued destabilization
unleashed by foreign military elements just as the people of Iraq are
suffering. In Eastern Africa there is an increase in the activities of
fundamentalist religious forces that draw their sustenance from the
United States and their allies. In 2001 the United States shut down the
Somalia money transfer scheme called Al Barakat but has turned a blind
eye to the extremists in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia who finance
extremism in Africa and the Middle Ears.

Just as in Iraq the peoples of many parts of Africa continue to die from
the intensified violence unleashed by the war on terror. Important
transformations of the economic conditions in the face of the global
crisis have been postponed because of the attempts by the USA to
militarily manage the capitalist crisis. The weakening of the United
States and Western Europe has been supplanted by the rise of the BRICS
states. Up to the present these states have not mobilized sufficiently
within the corridors of international institutions to join forces with
Africans to oppose the militarization of Africa.